Tuesday, November 1, 2016

We're All Going to Die

A large bowl (a sieve, actually) of
leftover candy is sitting by the front door, taunting me.

For we, alas, did not
encounter the expected hordes of Trick-of-Treaters.

There will be some happy
college students this evening, though.

I’m fairly certain there is no diet
in which Tootsie Rolls and Smarties are part of the suggested balance.Then again, most of the diets that become
popular enough to sift down to the level of my attention don’t seem to be
especially “balanced”.One either cuts
out fats, or grains, or meats; one always cuts out sugar.

Sometimes I wonder what poor
sugar did to anyone …

Aside from being saccharine, that is.

Supposedly one of the secrets to
such diets is that a reduction of variety in the options available nearly
always translates into a reduction in calories consumed overall, a notion which
makes sense intuitively, though it never worked for me.It is a far, far butter thing (or for me, at least
an easier thing) to place butter on one’s white bread, and develop temperance
with said item, than to eat ALL the gluten-free fiber-rich toast, or ALL the
saturated fats.Perhaps I am simply more
tempted by the same sort of gluttony as the Patient’s Mother, than by the more
recognizable kind?

At any rate, many people do seem to
find Special Secret Food Groups diets helpful.But an additional reason for their adoption is that such diets nearly
always come armed with a fascinating theory about body chemistry, in which familiar
words like “gut” partner with exotic foreigners like “lipid” or “alkaline”.And I had always imagined that these
explanations were mostly, well, bunk.After
all, it can’t be true that the Paleo diet and the Mediterranean diet are BOTH
good for you …

As if eating healthily weren’t
already hard enough, now we have choices, and choices to which there is no right
answer.It’s not the poison but the
dose!What makes you stronger kills
you!We’re all going to die!

Which is actually true, and a very
useful consideration, on this feast of All Saints and this eve of All Souls.We are, in fact, all going to die; and in the
grand scheme of things it probably doesn’t matter much whether we go to heaven
having satisfied our vanity or our carb cravings. Neither will really be “satisfied”
anyway, if heaven is the only real, the ultimate satisfaction.And it would indeed be not simply a useful,
but also an amusing consideration if the human search for The Perfect System to
nurture the body should turn out, in the end (as this latest fallible study
suggests) to have no solution.Bodies,
all bodies, and indeed all matter—as Aquinas warned us a several hundred ago—are
doomed to wear out sooner or later; and any purportedly scientific system which
tantalizes us as if we could avoid the fatal day is at best a distraction and
at worst a temptation to Be Like Gods.

I don’t mean to say
that we shouldn’t be prudent and temperate and good stewards of our bodies.But I do think that it is ironic and
appropriate that an age absorbed with physical satisfaction and perfection
might ultimately have to face up to the realization that these are unobtainable—not
merely obtainable at an unacceptable price, as our nightmarish dystopian movies
love to remind us, but unobtainable simply speaking.The physical is not the sort of thing that is perfectable. Glorifiable, someday, God willing. But not perfectable. And at some point everyone has
to face up to the this reality that he not only isn’t a perfect specimen, but also he can’t be, and, in fact, no one can.